In the prior art, the fabrication of printed circuit boards typically comprises the Step of drilling a plurality of small-diameter holes within the circuit board to accommodate the leads or pins of the various electrical components that are to be interfaced thereto. In most circuit board manufacturing processes, a plurality of circuit boards are typically drilled simultaneously by maintaining the circuit boards in a contiguous, overlapped orientation. As will be recognized, due to the extremely small diameter of the holes typically drilled into the circuit boards, the associated drill bits are formed having small diameter cutting tips and are fabricated from extremely hard materials such as tungsten carbide. Additionally, during the circuit board manufacturing process, the depth to which the cutting tip penetrates, i.e. extends into, the circuit boards must be tightly controlled. In this respect, conventional drill bits used to facilitate the drilling operation are generally provided with a locating ring disposed about the shank portion thereof which serves as a stop for accurately locating the drill bit, the collet or tool holder of the rotary drilling apparatus. Due to the importance of tightly controlling the penetration depth of the cutting tip into the circuit board(s), the distance separating the cutting tip from the locating ring must itself be tightly controlled, thus necessitating the precise positioning of the locating ring upon the shank portion of the drill bit.
In view of the difficulty and expense associated with the manufacture of carbide drill bits with small diameter cutting tips, once the cutting tip of the drill bit becomes dull, the same is typically re-sharpened rather than being discarded. However, the re-sharpening procedure often results in a slight loss of length from the cutting tip region of the drill bit. As will be recognized, since the distance separating the cutting tip from the locating ring must be maintained within a certain, tightly controlled range, the shortening of the drill bit which occurs as a result of the re-sharpening procedure requires that the position of the locating ring upon the shank portion be adjusted so as to reachieve the proper separation distance between the locating ring and the sharpened cutting tip.
Currently, the re-positioning of the locating ring upon the shank portion of the drill bit is typically accomplished manually through the utilization of conventional measurement techniques and devices such as calipers. However, such prior art re-positioning techniques are extremely time consuming and thus expensive, and oftentimes do not facilitate the positioning of the locating ring relative the cutting tip with the degree of accuracy needed to insure that the subsequent drilling operation will be properly conducted. The present invention specifically addresses these deficiencies in the prior art by providing an apparatus for automatically adjusting the positioning of a locating ring upon a drill bit subsequent to the re-sharpening of the cutting tip of the drill bit and/or automatically positioning such locating ring upon a drill bit.